Strix
Curate's Omelette
IHAVE never understood why a man accused of trying to be funny should face so grave a charge. Nobody earns derision or disapproval for trying to be gloomy, which is a tremendously easy thing to be and tends to make other people gloomy too. But endeavours to amuse—and between the ages of, roughly, eight and ninety-eight few of us can raise a smile without some form of conscious effort—are sub- jected to a searching and basically hostile scrutiny. Provided that he does it in temperate tones, a man who regularly asserts that civilisation is doomed is almost bound to gain the repu- tation of a fearless realist. A man who attempts, not always successfully, to make jokes is treated by society with far less tolerance.
It is the heavy and inescapable duty of Punch to try, every week, to be funny. The paper has discharged this duty for so long that it is immune from the peculiar odium which attaches to trying to be funny. A rival periodical, if anybody were rich and rash enough to launch one, would be caught in defilade by a withering fire from this quarter (as, indeed, Night and Day was in the late Thirties); but the British have been trained to associate Punch with risibility in the same sort of way that Professor Pavlov's dogs were trained to associate the ringing of a bell with food. They have sur- rendered their right to criticise Punch for trying to be funny, and this makes them cling the more tenaciously to their privi- lege of criticising its methods of making the attempt.
Punch is a British institution; it is also, through no fault of its own, a monopoly. Of other British institutions—The Times, for instance, or the Brigade of Guards—it is both easy and true to say : 'There's nothing quite like it.' The operative word is 'quite.' There is nothing at all like Punch—no reserves, like the Daily Telegraph or the Rifle Brigade, on which the nation could fall back; and this perhaps accounts for the jealousy with which its standards are assessed by a public, none of whom (after all) is under any obligation to read it, and few of whom hold easily reconcilable views on what is funny.
• • Punch is very much with us at the moment. The Punch Revue disappointed the critics but is filling the Duke of York's Theatre. The Pick of Punch, edited by Nicolas Bentley and published by Chatto and Windus at 15s., contains the cream of the past year's contributions; and The Best Humour from Punch, edited by William Cole, illustrated by Sprod and pub- lished by Neville Spearman—also at 15s.—offers a formidable rechauge of titbits from the rather lean post-war period.
`Rollicksome hours,' says the publisher of this last volume, `are ahead for the adventurer through these pages.' Although it is quite untrue, this ghastly statement is curiously congruous to the book's contents, many of which have the same ambi- ence of moth-balls. 'Marcus [a St. Bernard], with masterly histrionism, gazed at me with eager devotion, as though he would have given his last bone to have heard what I said.' . . . 'Two Tottenham children were given a severe warning by the magistrate for stealing toffee-apples from a barrow. They were reminded that this sort of thing is apt to lead to a sticky end.' The fact that there is a certain timeless- ness about this kind of stuff, that it might have appeared twenty, forty or even sixty years ago, cannot obscure the fact that the Punch for which it was good enough was going through an anemic phase. So, in a way, was the nation, as it threaded its way through the dark labyrinth of Austerity. Shortages, controls and bureaucrats provided the humorist with so many of his themes, the food office or the queue with so many of his mises-en- scene, that at times he seemed to be writing with ink manu- factured from boiled-down blackout curtains. The contributors to The Pick of Punch are living in less unspacious days and have a less automatic affinity with Strube's Little Man. The regulars, like H. F. Ellis and Alex Atkinson, who span the (unspecified) period covered by both volumes seem to write with more zest for Mr. Muggeridge than for his predecessors, and their ranks have been strengthened by an impressive access of talent from outside. The mustiness has gone.
It seems to me, however, that the Punch artists are a long way below the standard of the Punch writers. In his intro- duction to The Best Humour from Punch Mr. E. V. Knox recalls the indignation of a subscriber who failed to see the point of 'a drawing of two hippopotami in a swamp with the simple words below it, "I keep thinking it's Tuesday."' The drawing was, in fact, by Roger Pettiward, whose mastery of the allusive approach was firmly based on brilliant draughts- manship and a profound sense of nonsense. He was killed in the war, and not all the followers of a school which (as far as Punch was concerned) he did much to found are similarly qualified.
By a coincidence, much the funniest thing in The Best Humour is a long lecture by Roger Pettiward's brother, Daniel, on how to be a humorous artist without actually being able to draw, in which the following sentence seems to me to offer a sound, if indirect, diagnosis of much that is wrong with contemporary humorous art, both in Punch and outside it : 'Provided,' Mr. Pcttiward reminds his pupils, 'the drawings are bad enough and the jokes sufficiently baffling, no one with taste and susceptibility will care to identify himself with the man-in-the-street in not thinking them funny.'
Except for Mr. Ronald Searle (whose splendid 'Rake's Progress' series is included in The Pick) and Anton, who sees our society in rather the same terms that Harry Graham saw it, Punch's artists appear largely to have lost interest in the British character. Gadgets have a disproportionate attraction for them (there is one drawing of a rajah shooting from the back of his elephant while seated on a shooting-stick, and another of a man sitting on a shooting-stick while ski-ing downhill; two appearances in the same year is at least one more than this joke deserved). But no one follows in the foot- steps of the irreplaceable Pont, no one carries on the more obvious tranche de vie traditions of George Belcher and Frank Reynolds. Themes are not necessarily funnier for being far- fetched.
Lack of space, and the fact that it has already been noticed in these pages, forbid me from saying more about The Punch Revue than that I concur, reluctantly, with the critics. I found it agreeable, but only moderately rollicksome. It is, however, drawing the town in spite of its bad reviews. This is no doubt due partly to the noticeable charms of the chorus and the considerable talents of Miss Binnie Hale; but I suspect that some of the credit is due to Mr. Muggeridge for converting Punch from the dowdy detritus of dentists' waiting-rooms into an organ on which the comment 'I never see it now' has ceased to denote a negative form of discrimination.
Previous page
